Palmer Luckey

By Ramin Talaie/Corbis/Getty Images.

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Bio

Baby-faced, rosy-cheeked, Hawaiian-shirt fetishizing 23-year-old Palmer Luckey—the name might as well be out of Bugs Bunny script—just might be the world’s premier private collector of virtual-reality “head-mounted displays,” or H.M.D.s. Fifty-six exquisite pieces, to be precise (and that’s not including the homemade ones). If that doesn’t get you geek cred, than nothing will.

While his peers were hanging out at the mall on weekends, Luckey was bidding on H.M.D.s at government electronics auctions. “My biggest score was a unit that originally cost about $97,000 in the 90s,” he told Eurogamer in 2013, “and I picked it up for $80.” A born tinkerer, as a teen Luckey could be found in the basement cracking video-game consoles and fixing discarded iPhones. Even at age five, he designed a contraption he called “the melter.” “It was then that I learned that you could touch nine-volt batteries to steel wool and make fires,” he told the Los Angeles Times.

His latest contraption? The Oculus Rift H.M.D. With the help of a wildly successful Kickstarter campaign (which raised almost 10 times its target), Luckey got his pet prototype off the ground in 2011. Fellow “V.R. nerd,” legendary game programmer John Carmack, noticed and the rest is—well, if not yet history, a promising work in progress. And it got one step closer to reality when Facebook bought out Luckey for $2 billion, in 2014.